Getting ready to setup a HDHomeRun...

[gplasky]

Originally Posted by carlgar

I made the mistake of upgrading to the 7/20 release. It was a very BIG mistake. It screwed up my tuning and wasted 2 hours of my time! I ended up going back to network encoding to insure proper tuning. I can no longer recommend Silicondust until they start providing documentation for their releases. I am so tired of tring to figure out how their software is suppose to interact with Sage.

I saw this too. I think it is his new direct tuning utility overwriting the bda remap file. I took a look in the file and just had to redo the physical channel to the new channel numbers it put in there. Not sure why or how it remapped them but it did. Took me about 5 minutes to fix after I figured out what it did.


Gerry

[carlgar]

I just looked at my bda remap file and that does appear to be what occurred, which make me even more upset with SiliconDust. The first thing I did was look at the change log to see what changes were made. I almost did not upgrade because it did not look like the changes would have any effect on the problems I was having. I decided to go ahead just to be current and I expected it to be about a 15 minute operation. When I realized that there was problems with release and I did not have the time to look into it, I decided to just go back to the 7/16 release. After going back it also was failing (makes sense since the BDA remap file was changed). At that point it looked like I was forced into debugging , I then updated to the 7/20 version again. I did not even consider the BDA file, I was looking at new stuff such as the channel editor was showed the channels perfectly. But Sage still was not showing the proper channels. At that point I was running out of time, I just went back to the network encoding which works much better anyway. I will not even try the BDA drivers again until a new Sage release. Sage seems to have problems displaying the recordings. I am just fed up with companies like silicondust that seem to think their customers prefer figuring out the problems they may cause instead of writing some basic documentation. Such as why was a channel editor needed?

[gplasky]

Originally Posted by carlgar

I just looked at my bda remap file and that does appear to be what occurred, which make me even more upset with SiliconDust. The first thing I did was look at the change log to see what changes were made. I almost did not upgrade because it did not look like the changes would have any effect on the problems I was having. I decided to go ahead just to be current and I expected it to be about a 15 minute operation. When I realized that there was problems with release and I did not have the time to look into it, I decided to just go back to the 7/16 release. After going back it also was failing (makes sense since the BDA remap file was changed). At that point it looked like I was forced into debugging , I then updated to the 7/20 version again. I did not even consider the BDA file, I was looking at new stuff such as the channel editor was showed the channels perfectly. But Sage still was not showing the proper channels. At that point I was running out of time, I just went back to the network encoding which works much better anyway. I will not even try the BDA drivers again until a new Sage release. Sage seems to have problems displaying the recordings. I am just fed up with companies like silicondust that seem to think their customers prefer figuring out the problems they may cause instead of writing some basic documentation. Such as why was a channel editor needed?

I have to cut SilconDust some slack. They're treading into new territory. They are creating a product and getting it to work with what, 6 mainstream products. (Sage, Myth, Mediaportal, GBPVR, MCE and Beyond TV.) Both on Vista and XP and both 32 bit and 64 bit. Wow. It has to back itself into already established products and create workarounds to get it functioning with all of these products. I expect to have some issues somewhere along the line. I think the channel editor was created based on compaints of manually having to create the remaps. Another fellow on the SD forums had created a utility that automated some of this too.

And maybe as the product matures it can get a better idea of the how to do this. But look at the incomsistentices among the cable companies too. When I do a scan some of my QAM channels have freq, channel number, channel names right in the stream. Others don't. How do you deal with that in a simple, automated way?

I think both Sage and SilconDust has made great headway with the device. It was almost all the way there as a network encoder. Now they've switched gears to utilize the bda driver features. This is also the way of the future. It may be a slight step back in operation now but in the long run it should be better.

Plus Sage is beta and the latest SD drivers from the forum I always view as beta. I think these were moved to the official download page because of it fixing an issue with the direct or DHCP configuration. But I think he should keep these off the main download until enough users download and test. The drivers from June should have stayed on the main page. And I agree documentation should be better and a warning would of helped with this version.

Gerry

[carlgar]

While I agree with most of your comments, this does not excuse some major oversights.
1. Changes to the BDA remap file are major and should have been mentioned in the changelog. It is not like they made 12 or 15 changes and forgot to mention 1. They only mentioned 2 and gave no indication that it would force existing BDA driver users to re-enter new data into Sage.

2. There is no useful information about what a tuner editor is suppose to do. As far as I can tell it just allows the user to store some useful information. I am sure that it is intended to do something useful but I have not been able to read minds for quite a while.

3. All of their new releases probably should be released in the forums first to see if there are any surprises.

I would not have been this hard on them if there had been some indication that could break a working system. The issue was compounded when it prevented me from returning to the previous drivers. They should have created a new file to be written by them and then asked to user to save their original file and rename the new file. In general, I just do not see any sign that they gave any thought to the current BDA users. I know that programmers don't like to document but give users something to go on besides trial and error.

[gplasky]

Yeah. I agree with your major oversights. Actually I'm with you on this one. It was a big break on their part with no warning. These releases need to stay in the forum until tested by users.

Gerry